Tag Archive: David Lynch


Illuminating the Lynchian universe

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April 13, 2026

TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN, PART 8.  Movies Minute By Minute  – Jeff Wood (Bloomsbury Time/Codes Series, 2025)

“Twin Peaks as The Return is the epic and serial momento mori of 20th century Americana passing through the violent taxidermy of its own hallucinatory euphoria and into the perpetually reanimating nightmare of itself, looping and glitching as violently unreal.”

The fact that the above quote is taken from the endnotes section gives a flavour of the mind-blowing quality of the text contained in the main body of this short (120 pages) but immense book. 

Jeff Wood embarks on a deep dive into the Twin Peaks universe taking the risk of drowning in the vast ocean of David Lynch’s visionary genius. The Ohio born author swims freely in the ambiguities, weirdness and complexities he discovers.

Twin Peaks’ original run in 1990 comprised two seasons and 30 episodes. Quite simply it redefined what television series could achieve in a way that modern streamers now take for granted . Season 3, promoted as a ‘A Limited Event Series” subsequently landed in 2017. Lynch and co-writer Mark Frost were given carte blanche in ‘the return’ to go with the flow, a degree of self-control that could have proved disastrous but actually resulted in 18 episodes that brilliantly expanded and enriched the narrative universe of Twin Peaks.

At its epicenter is ‘Part 8 Gotta Light? which has rightly been heralded not only as the pinnacle of the ‘show’ but on a par with the greatest of Lynch’s cinematic achievements. It’s hard to think of any of the greatest series –like, say, ‘The Wire’ or ‘Breaking Bad’ – that could be so satisfactorily encapsulated in a standalone episode lasting just 58 minutes.

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Cool quotes for movie buffs

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February 5, 2026

While working on my soon to be published book on British cinema and identity I accumulated a lot of quotes about films in general.

These are some of my favourites:

Illustration from a 1922 article on “The Romantic History of the Motion Picture”: George Eastman was trying to improve the kodak when he hit on celluloid film
  • “Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates. And film culture is not analysis, it is the agitation of the mind” – Werner Herzog
  • “The study of the film as a means to human understanding is not a mere intellectual exercise. It is part of a continuing study we have all got to make in our search for harmony in a tortured world.” – Ross McLean, Head, Films & Visual Information Division, Unesco
  • “Marginal cinema is now the only form of national cinema” – Meaghan Morris
  • “The problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically.” —Jean-Luc Godard
  • “If there’s a corridor, there’s a film” – Céline Sciamma
  • “Films that are entertainments give simple answers but I think that’s ultimately more cynical, as it denies the viewer room to think. If there are more answers at the end, then surely it is a richer experience.” – Michael Haneke
  • “Sometimes film needs the room to dream” – David Lynch
  • ‘I’d rather people feel a film before understanding it.’ – Robert Bresson
  • “Film is a highly evocative ideological sphere. It does not reflect its time or society; instead it reinforces, moulds, twists and subverts the many truths of culture.” – Tara Brabazon
  • “The created world must obey its own logic” – V.F. Perkins
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The Substance – a brainless body horror

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October 18, 2024

THE SUBSTANCE directed by Coralie Fargeat ( USA, 2024)

I suppose the premise of this film is that women are pressurised into preserving a body shape and tone to the point that they are seen as worthless when deemed to be beyond their prime. Demi Moore is Elizabeth Sparkle, the presenter a morning TV exercise show – Pump It Up . A ruthless producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) decides she is past it and is looking for someone younger.
Since all the male characters are either guileless nerds or manipulative lechers it begs the question as to why a woman as intelligent as Sparkle should feel pressurised into pleasing them.
After narrowly escaping serious injury in a car crash Sparkle is advised to take a supposedly miraculous product (‘Substance’) by a medic who looks so plastic that he hardly seems a good advertisement for this product. Without doing any further research she signs up for the treatment and is undeterred by having to collect the drugs in person from a shady back street address. Personally, I would at least have Googled it!
Ironically, Moore looks so well preserved and in such good shape that she seems to already have discovered her own personal wonder drug to stem the ravages of age. Nevertheless, she injects the liquid which results in a more youthful body double literally emerging from within.
The graphic birth scene is straight out of the Cronenberg playbook and the surreal atmosphere of the film owes a lot to David Lynch. However, French director Coralie Fargeat lacks the craft and vision of these mentors so the film merely descends into absurdist depths. The result is that any serious messages are lost. If there’s a feminist intent it drowns in a sea of blood and gore.
Out of Sparkle Margaret Qualley appears as Sue, a Barbie-like creation whose ‘perfect’ body compensates for her air-brain. For a film that assumes to criticise the patriarchal obsession with shape, tone and youthfulness, it crudely gratifies the male gaze by zooming in on her twerking ass in tight-fitting bikini. There’s a fine line between parodying body obsession and pandering to it which the film oversteps every time. Demi Moore’s committed performance is a small saving grace. A scene of her preparing to go out on a date and desperately applying make-up is brilliantly done. Her transformation from mature beauty into hideous hag is effectively rendered yet the story is ultimately a sensationalised parable with nothing substantial to say. With no moral code to steer it the director is reduced to a gross-out splatter-driven finale that emphasises its vacuous content.
Whatever happened to the idea of ageing gracefully?

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The Fabelmans – It’s a family affair

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December 28, 2022

THE FABELMANS directed by Steven Spielberg (USA, 2022)

I thought we were going to see ‘Jaws’!

Steven Spielberg has a happy knack of making me wish that life was more like the movies . There’s not a trace of social realism in his latest sugary-sweet film but because it is made by Spielberg and about his own family I want it to be real.

Spielberg always makes family friendly movies. Even the harrowing war scenes of Saving Private Ryan are counterbalanced by a fundamental belief in the decency of human beings. His movie career has been guided by an old school desire to make movies where entertainment is always fundamental.

It’s no great surprise to learn that Spielberg comes from a well-healed and comfortable Jewish-American family. His parents were loving and supportive even when their relationship was struggling. One of the most traumatic events as a child was being uprooted from Arizona to California. 

We see the young Spielberg portrayed as Sam Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle)  beginning his experiments in film by getting a home movie camera to replicate the train crash scene from Cecil B. DeMille’s ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’. The ‘hobby’ soon becomes an obsession and, by this fictionalised account, he was a born director. Who can possibly argue with this?

His father Burt (Paul Damo) was a computer engineer who seems to know everything about science but misses the fact that his wife’s friendship with his own best friend Bennie (Seth Rogan) is not all it seems.  Sam’s mother Mitzi is played by Michelle Williams with a bright-eyed vulnerability that reminded me of Judy Garland.

This is Spielberg’s most personal movie and it’s as sweet and flavoursome as apple pie; a coming of age story that we all know will have a happy ending. Even the anti-semetic high school bullies don’t seem so bad.  It is classic storytelling from one of America’s greatest movie storytellers.

The one stroke of genius was the decision to cast David Lynch as ageing film director John Ford. This hilarious cameo performance ends the movie on a high. The rest as they say, is history. No sequels required.

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Movies for perverts

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March 3, 2019

THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA written and presented by Slavok Žižek (Directed by Sophie Fiennes, 2006)
the_pervert27s_guide_to_cinema

The title of this enlightening three-part documentary is eye-catching but likely to be misleading.

A pervert is someone whose sexual behaviour is considered abnormal or unacceptable but this film is not a guide for those seeking gratification from soft or hardcore porn in modern movies.

The unconventional Slovenian philosopher & psychoanalyst examines how the function of cinema is to mediate between our ‘illicit’ drives and our socially conditioned actions.

In Freudian terms, this is the internal struggle between the id and the super-ego. Žižek states provocatively  that “we need the truth of a fiction to express what we really are” or, more ambiguously, “desire is a wound of reality”.

Watching movies, he argues, is not merely an escapist pastime but an essential means by which to show how reality is constructed. Continue reading →

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